Fancy Film Friday #3: Goth

Goth, 2008 (Japan)
Initially happy to exchange books on morbid subjects, two high school students begin investigating a series of recent murders.

I'll admit it. I first watched this because of Kanata Hongo. He's kind of pretty but also kind of... creepy-looking, and that's always a good combo in my book. I ended up loving the movie for plenty of other reasons. The imagery, the plot twists... but mostly this relationship, guys. It kills me. I've seen the movie so many times, and I still don't know what to think about it. This is the kind of thing that keeps me coming back, you know. Dynamics. Relationships. Stares and snarls and smiles and the symbolism behind every little word and every little gesture.

There's a novel, too. Or, let me rephrase that, this movie is actually the adaptation of a novel - can't say I've read it yet, but I've read Summer, Fireworks, And My Corpse by the same author, and let me tell you, it was brilliant. Everything I've ever wanted from Japanese horror, and then some. I very nearly dropped a frying pan on my foot a few minutes after finishing the first short story - it's got that kind of ending. You read the story, you like the story, you put down the story.

And then five minutes later the story grabs you by the neck and pulls your eyes open and good lord, how did you miss that.

Unbelievable.
xx

The Butterfly House

Irrelevant but pretty photo of a fish. You're welcome.

Last year, I tried to raise butterflies. The completely average Pieris Brassicae, to be precise. I found caterpillars and a steady supply of their favorite food, I set up cute little jars with cute little mesh fabric wrapped around the top, and I went as far as to name one of the jars "Jar Of Success" (no really... I put a post-it on it) because it housed the fattest caterpillars of the bunch. It was a complete and utter disaster.

Fast forward a few days, I noticed the caterpillars were kind of... inactive. Fast forward a little more. There is no easy to say this. I started noticing tiny little things moving inside my precious caterpillars. Fast forward just a tiny bit, tiny bit more and they had eaten their way out and were building cocoons with the caterpillar's silk. Dear lord. I had nighmares about zombified caterpillars for two whole nights after that.

Turns out I'd been a victim of a parasitic wasp, the infamous Cotesia Glomerata. If you're interested in the mechanics of chemical warfare as employed by tiny little bugs, this is one great post on the subject - though the photos might be a bit graphic for those among us who are not particularly fond of crawling things that eat other crawling things from inside out. Around the end of the year, I had the opportunity to speak to a butterfly expert - who told me his caterpillars had met the same fate. I let out a sigh. Turns out it wasn't just me being completely inefficient after all.

But let's stop with the gloom and doom and talk about a place in Lisbon where people are actually doing this successfully! Aka the Borboletário, or The Butterfly House, of the National Museum Of Natural History. It opened to the public in 2006, and it's a small, enclosed garden of mediterranean host plants, where you can simply walk in and observe the different life stages of our most common butterflies, and their interaction with their environment. Sadly, I didn't see any new ones when I was there, but it's been a bad year for butterflies anyway. Maybe I'll go back once it's warmer.

Aaaaand... I'll leave you with pictures in the meantime.
















(Borboletário do Jardim Botânico de Lisboa - Rua da Escola Politécnica, Lisboa)

I thought it was beyond cute how these butterflies wouldn't fly away from me - I could have touched them, that's how friendly they were. I don't actually know whether butterflies can be social with humans. But if there's a good place to run that research, this is it. Do visit if you have the chance! Cheaper tickets if you pay for the museum and the botanical garden as a package!

Do as I say!
xx

Fancy Film Friday #2: Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch, 2011 (USA)
A young girl is institutionalized by her abusive stepfather. Retreating to an alternative reality as a coping strategy, she envisions a plan which will help her escape.

When I first watched this movie, I was in a nearly-empty movie theatre. The opening sequence chilled me to the bone, and the very end had me struggling for a tissue. My first words after the movie were... wanna go again?

It blew me away. It's an uncomfortable movie, yes. It's uncomfortable, and thought-provoking. It's a movie about rape, about coping, about sexuality, about freedom, about oppression, and you're being manipulated through most of it. The dragons, the corsets, the brothel, the katana and the helicopter and the zeppelin... none of that is real. We see our main character's fantasies, her projections, her pantomimes played by a persona who shares little more than her looks and her desire to escape - not even her name. She's so detached from herself, so curled up in her own inner world, that she doesn't let us see what's actually happening to her, behind that flimsy curtain of deception that we're not allowed to pull open until her quest is finished. Is it sucessful? That depends. From my perspective, yes, it is. Not fully, but enough. You can't always win everything, or save everyone. And to me, it's more than enough that she fought back until she couldn't anymore.

xx